January 31, 2013 AT 12:00 pm

DIY BioPrinter #3dthursday

Check out this great biohacking Instructables tutorial that features how to make your own DIY bioprinter!

Bioprinting is printing with biological materials. Think of it as 3D printing, but with squishier ingredients! There’s a lot of work being done at research labs and big companies like Organovo on print human tissues and human organs, with an eye towards drug testing, and transplantation into humans. Check out these amazing TED talks by Anthony Atala, for example:

All this sounds incredible complex, but the fact is that the basic technologies are very accessible – it’s all based on inkjet and/or 3D printing! So a bunch of us at BioCurious decided we wanted to play around with this technology ourselves – and the BioPrinter Community Project was born! (Come join us, every Thursday evening at BioCurious!)

We wrote this instructable in part to document our project for our fellow Citizen Scientists in the DIYbio community, so it’s getting a little long. For those who want a quick 1-minute intro, you may want to check this little video: